David Brower

"We do not inherit the earth from our fathers, we are borrowing it from our children," proclaims a chiselled stone at the National Aquarium in Washington, ascribing the words to David Brower, the father of the modern conservation movement and its greatest, incorruptible crusader, who has died aged 88.

But it was typical of Brower's stormy trajectory that he later failed to recognise the sentiment as his own, putting down its appearance, in an interview, to being plied with a third Martini in a North Carolina bar by a journalist. By the end of his life, he took such a view to be uncharacteristically conservative: "We're not borrowing from our children, we're stealing from them - and it's not even considered to be a crime."

Twice nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, Brower founded Friends of the Earth, after being ejected from the Sierra Club, an organisation which had originally been set up for hikers in America but which, under his leadership, became a powerful environmental group.

He kept dams out of the Grand Canyon; helped create the Redwood national park; pushed through the landmark Wilderness Act, which set aside millions of acres of US public land, establishing the concept of keeping the countryside pristine; and stopped oil and timber corporations having the run of Alaska. Throughout, he maintained his vision in the face of an American environmental movement increasingly drawn to the corridors of power through lobbying and politicking in Washington.

Brower was born in Berkeley, California, when there were no bridges to obstruct the view through San Francisco Bay to the Pacific, and the surrounding hills were untouched. His father was an academic, but his mother went blind when her son was seven. Helping her see, he recalled, sharpened his own appreciation of the natural surroundings.

After high school, he entered the University of California, Berkeley, in 1930 to study entomology, but left to become a mountaineer. He made 70 first ascents of the perpendicular granite rocks of Yosemite park, where he established 19 new routes, and scaled the 12,000ft-high mountains of California's Sierra Nevada. He was an instructor in the US 10th Mountain Division, and, during the second world war, served as a combat-intelligence officer in Italy, where he won the Bronze Medal.

When Brower joined the Sierra Club in 1933, it was an elite institution with just 2,000 members. He was elected to the board in 1942, and on returning from war service, edited the club magazine. In 1952, he became executive director, and built the club into a political force, raising its membership to 77,000 by the 1960s, and pioneering the use of films and journalism to put across the ecological argument. During his regime, politicians stopped and listened when the Sierra Club took a position.

But in 1963, Brower failed to save Glen Canyon, in his view "the most beautiful place on earth, no exception". It was a deep narrow ravine in the northern Arizona desert, with wondrously shaped rock walls, cascading waterfalls, bowers of ferns, quiet pools and Indian inscriptions. However, the club's board voted to support a compromise development plan, and it was dammed. Eventually, the rising waters of the river in the canyon's bottom obliterated its wonders for ever.

Renowned for his almost mystical ability to return to the fray after defeat (John McPhee's 1990 book on him was entitled Encounters With The Archdruid), Brower was spurred on by this reverse to more intense opposition to the construction of several proposed dams in the Grand Canyon. In 1966, the Sierra Club took out huge advertisements in major American newspapers asking people to save the canyon from being flooded "for profit". The next day, the US Internal Revenue Service revoked the club's tax exemptions, available only if it kept out of political activities. But this insensitivity boomeranged in headlines across the country. Brower recalled: "People who didn't know whether they loved the Grand Canyon sure knew whether or not they loved the IRS."

When Floyd Dominy, the government official in charge of dam-building, declared that the canyon "lakes" (reservoirs) created by the dams would enable people to see the walls better from boats, Brower ran an ad saying: "Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?" Within 12 months, he and his supporters had won.

Yet only two years later, in 1969, Brower was out. The argument in the Sierra Club was ostensibly about a series of unsold coffee-table books he had commissioned as part of his strategy of showing off nature's wonders to encourage preservation. But central to the dispute was the club's accommodation of corporate interests, Brower having made enemies of members on immigration issues, and on notions, held by some, that came close to eugenics.

The same year, Brower formed the more radical Friends of the Earth (FoE), which incorporated opposition to nuclear weapons as a green issue - something the Sierrra Club had declined to embrace. A motto he never needed to go back on was his "think globally, act locally", coined for FoE. But by 1984, the organisation was in debt and the staff were rebelling. In 1986, when the board tried to move their headquarters to Washington, Brower resigned and went to work with the San Francisco-based Earth Island Institute, which he had formed in 1982. It has had major achievements in preserving wildlife, such as sea turtles and dolphins.

Last year, Brower withdrew at the last minute from the election to become president of the Sierra Club, and wrote a conciliatory letter about the need for unity. But he could not resist quoting Isaiah about the club and its corporate dealmakers: "Thou hast multiplied the nation, but not increased the joy."

It was the joy of an unspoilt world to which Brower devoted his long life. He leaves his wife, Anne, three sons and a daughter.

 David Ross Brower, environmental campaigner, born July 1 1912; died November 5 2000